About 10 years ago, when I was at The New Yorker, I worked on launching the redesign, paywall, and the move to WordPress. We actually had most of the archive technically ready to go. The data wasn’t the hard part.
The real blocker was permissions and rights. Contracts going back a century obviously never contemplated digital publication, domains, or the internet at all. Untangling who owned what, and securing the right to republish everything online, was a massive legal and logistical undertaking.
That’s what held us back then, not so much the technology. Really glad to see that chapter finally closed.
Any idea what changed, if anything? Court decisions made in the meantime simplifying things?
Hopefully the content fits in a few buckets (cartoons, fiction, non-fiction) as far as different terms for rights might go. And then from there, you can lop off anything that's past its copyright term (?). Then maybe the next step is grouping works by the agent/publisher, if any? Or maybe all the contracts with the New Yorker are signed by individuals, with the New Yorker as a publisher. I don't know.
I assume it was a matter of time - ten years of digging into contracts or chasing people/agencies down (speculative on my part)? Bear in mind, if you are unsure if you have rights to a piece then you cannot use it until you know for sure - I am sure that was part of it too.
It happens. I felt like the Copilot/Autopilot CMS team had a lot going on so I understood. But it was a good play for a decent native ad experience (example: we ran a decently funny set of Bill Murray cartoons - and that was good) oddly enough and assumed that would ensure its survival.
The real blocker was permissions and rights. Contracts going back a century obviously never contemplated digital publication, domains, or the internet at all. Untangling who owned what, and securing the right to republish everything online, was a massive legal and logistical undertaking.
That’s what held us back then, not so much the technology. Really glad to see that chapter finally closed.